ONE NIGHT STAND (50)

Directed by: Mike Figgis

Starring: Wesley Snipes, Nastassia Kinski, Robert Downey Jr.

The Pitch: A disaffected yuppie has a fling with a woman he meets on a business trip ; she later turns out to be the sister-in-law of his best friend, who's dying of AIDS.

Theo Sez: Glorious style, shame about the content. You might call Figgis' visuals no more than a melancholy version of MTV, but they're bracingly eclectic - throwing things into the mix, whether it's our hero talking to camera or a grainy black-and-white insert to illustrate his thoughts - and, as in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, he does a terrific signature schtick, tiny ellipses (fading to black, then fading into the same scene a few moments later) that very effectively evoke emotional dislocation. Unfortunately, what's here is barely worth evoking - a lazy tale of midlife crisis, rife with lame dialogue and over-obvious indicators : our hero's wife gives him instructions while they're making love (she's a control-freak!), his yuppie friends pass crude homophobic remarks and counter "Claudia Schiffer always looks so Aryan" with "No, she's German actually" (they are fools!). It's no surprise that it has music playing throughout the big scenes, occasionally drowning out the words, or that it flaunts its casual acceptance of "controversial" issues - never even alluding to the inter-racial angle, jokily having a dying man's friends bring him a big fat joint to see him through his last days - even at the expense of the plot : adultery means little in this breezy nonconformist world, which may be why the central relationship (which takes up less than half the running-time anyway) never comes into focus. It's an exercise in style, and a checklist of hip attitudes ; not a particularly human movie, much less a romantic one - except, bizarrely enough (given the prominence of Downey's AIDS-stricken character, and the various gratuitous references to our hero's sexuality), as a latent-homosexual love story.